It took me a few evenings to learn and get it done but IT'S DONE!
25% of my blogger posts did not make it and I have some broken links at the moment that I need to resolve. That will give me the opportunity to update the SEO (Blogger really sucked at that). I am not too worried although a reader just emailed me about a broken link so I have to get on it.
I would appreciate some feedback and test drive … Maybe there is a plugin I am missing or it's not setup properly. Any feedback is appreciated! I probably won't be able to resolve issues until later on tonight (Vancouver time).
I would like to thank the following people for their help:
Interestingly enough, I have found that it takes quite a while for the new sites to propagate itself through all the cached servers around the world for anyone attempting it.
I've done the switch 3 times now. It is not easy or fun, but it is worth it in the long haul. You might notice a traffic drop from the link issues, but it comes back even faster once you move.
Nice job switching to Wordpress. I did this a couple of months ago and it took the whole weekend! Unfortunately, there was no easy way to transfer my articles from Weebly. Let me tell you, you will love Wordpress! Good move!
Congrats on the move to Wordpress! Are you using the free Wordpress hosting or are you self hosting? I am still on Blogger, and am not quite ready/convinced to put the time in to move over to Wordpress. You'll have to let me know what sort of differences you see.
I am with a free hosting in Canada. It's fine for now but I suspect I'll move to one of the bigger one at some point. I am trying to keep it free for now …
I sort of worked out a check list in my head to execute during my move and making sure I was covering all bases without losing my Google Juice. I'll find out someday if my G-Juice is still there …
- Link format is important (The import feature does a good job at importing – expect for the posts it missed). I have to say that I did not expect much but it did alright. I made sure my monthly permalink were matching. Permalink is keyword I learned only recently when joining yakezie, it's not something you deal with blogger.
- I needed to retain my RSS feeds and I believe I did. It's another metrics for traffic so I did not want to lose it as it double in the past few months.
- All comments came with the posts so that was a bonus. I did not have much expectation with that either. It's good since comments seem to attract more comments.
There are 3 things to learn:
- Managing your hosting environment with something like cPanel. I never had to do that with Blogger.
- Learning WordPress and the themes to get your layout the way you want. The more reading and research you do upfront, the better. Atahualpa was recommend by another blogger and I like the look. I took a leap of faith and went with it.
- Migrating your hosting was my biggest hurdle. Mark @ BuyLikeBuffett unblocked me. I knew he had done it.
I was struggling between having everything perfect before making the switch and I realized I could constantly fine tune it and it was nagging at me. I have not written a new post yet since I have been busy with that and the longer it dragged on, the longer I would have settled back in my routine. So I went live, even though I have missing posts. I hope it will be forgiven by my readers until I get them all back in.
If I can be helpful to someone else, let me know, I am ready to pay it forward
I'm using Dave's atm – free. But there are limits to it for sure (the free service). We'll have to move to a paid host eventually but i'm definitiely interested in which one you are using.
Yes, I am with Dave's Network. I have one issue that isn't resolved and it's bugging me. My domain is resolving itself correctly but within my blog, it always seem to use an ip address\~thepassi which was my temporary address and that has not changed yet. I don't think it's good for indexing … and I'd like to have it fixed.
2 days of tracking down why the address was showing my temp ip address … It turns out that I installed WordPress with my temp ip and word press simply remembers that. For all the posts I imported from Blogger, it used that ip address.
The fix is simple, I went in the database and updated all the posts to have the proper ip address. Not a very efficient DB relationship … In the options table there are 2 fields that I needed to update to my domain name. I wished it would have propagated down but no … I updated nearly 200 records in my post DB to have the new domain name.
If you go to the site now. ALL IS GOOD!
Now that I understand the DB structure, I may just try to retain my google links … Since it turns out that blogger uses .html for every post and Word Press doesn't so all the links in search engine have no homes
It's getting there … and many learnings along the way.
You could try that to redirect requests for html files to the same URL without the .html at the end
Alternatively maybe you can even specify this in your permalink structure and tell Wordpress to add .html at the end. At this point you might be more savvy than me… I haven't had to muck around with the DB and things like that until now! ;)
It looks great. Very clean. You'll love Wordpress. If you can migrate you will learn Wordpress very fast. I went from Serendipity to Wordpress and lost lots of stuff. I don't regret it though. So many more options! The only problem that I see is that I'm not on your blogroll.
Thanks. I am just about to try Kevin's fix above. Otherwise, I will be busy this weekend fixing links. I think it's the last remaining item I have to fix. I should have realized that before I open the flood gate … but such is life. A little bump in the road for a far greater reward!
As for my blog roll, I was hoping to find one that can rotate through my list and show the 10 most recent … The I can have more people … Otherwise it's too long on the main page.
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